Pingdom Tools

Overview of Pingdom Tools

Uptime and performance monitoring made easy. Everything you need to monitor your website. With Pingdom’s website monitoring you’ll be the first to know when your website is down, and you’ll stay on top of your website’s performance. Monitoring your websites and servers is a smart decision.

We've used Pingdom and their monitoring seems pretty solid, however, I can't recommend them. My two big complaints are about their web interface and more importantly their reliability.

Their website, while it looks slick, is a bit challenging to use. I've been using it for about 12 months and the organization still does not make sense. I spend a lot of time looking for things on the web interface because it is so poorly organized. It is hard to see exactly how your monitors are setup or why they fail. For example, if your monitor fails because it did not find text on a webpage, you don't know that is why it failed. You would get a failure alert, and then you have to dig in, review all the settings of your monitoring to determine that is the reason. It makes troubleshooting very painful.

The second key issue I have with Pingdom was their reliability. Their text based alerting did not handle my U.S. phone number for several months. We had some outages to which we were not notified because they were unable to send text messages. We got emails about the outages, and resolved the issues that way. When I went back to look at the logs, it showed that my text messages were not going through, but somehow Pingdom did not see that error.

All I can say, is it is incredibly embarrassing that Pingdom was not alerted to when their own system was failing.